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ABrooks comments on What Curiosity Looks Like - Less Wrong
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I compare it to theft because of the comparable aims of the thief and the filesharer: in most cases, I expect, and in the kind of cases Anubhav raised, something is copied in violation of IP law because it is convenient for the filesharer or saves him or her some money. That's similar to theft in a way that it's no to vandalism or tresspassing.
As to your clarificatory question, I'm not sure. So assume I agree; what are the consequences of understanding things this way?
Then you may just as well call it "insurance fraud", or "tax evasion", or "turnstile jumping".
In a universe where you didn't begin off with the assumption that copying things can be considered "theft", because the companies have a vested interested in presenting it as theft, I doubt it'd ever even cross your mind that copying something can be reasonably compared to stealing it.
E.g. did you ever ask whether JKR has the right to mention the name of "Merlin"? Or whether Disney has the right to use Hercules or Aladdin as characters? Did it occur to you to call such things theft -- merely because it was convenient and saved money for these people/companies to copy such names/stories?
It did, long before companies started trying to present it as such within my hearing.
The theft comparison isn't really my point. My point is that it's wrong to break the law for personal gain. None of these are cases of that kind of activity. It may be that the law itself is wrong, but that doesn't itself make it okay to break that law, especially when your breaking of it is aimed purely at saving you some money and not in any way at undermining the law.
Just to be clear... would you say that speeding, or consensual sodomy in Texas prior to 2003, are wrong in essentially the same way?
That's a good question. I guess I would say the same thing about speeding, but not about consensual sodomy. In the latter case, I think it's still immoral to break the law so as to engage in sodomy, but that this is just outweighed by the importance of being able to freely engage in a sex life of one's choosing and with consenting adult partners. With speeding and with filesharing, the immorality of breaking the law is weighed against in the first case convenience (unless it's an emergency) and in the latter case saving one's money. Neither of these seem to me to overcome the moral problem of breaking the law.
ETA: The point about speeding is a good one. We generally understand people to be responsible for bad but unintended outcomes only so long as what they're doing is bad in the first place. So while we think speeding is commonplace and no great evil, we do get quite worked up when someone speeds and kills someone else as a result. The killing, wholly unintended, is their fault. I think this is a sign that we do consider speeding to be a bit immoral. If the same thing happened to someone who was driving in a perfectly legal way, we wouldn't ascribe to them any responsibility for the deaths.
I'm not sure I can come up with any similar accidental consequence of filesharing. Maybe the collapse of a publishing company? But this couldn't be the result of any one person's activity.
Mm. OK.
So, if someone were to say they endorsed some instances of illegal filesharing because, while they agreed that it was immoral to break the law, they believed that this immorality was outweighed by the importance of being able to freely distribute and obtain information of one's choosing, your conclusion would be that their reasoning was sound as far as it went, but that they were not correctly estimating the relative importance of those two things.
Yes?
I do think that would be a reasonable tack, and it wouldn't be hard to convince me that the relative importance of free access to information outweighs the legal violation. Two things give me pause though: first the information one wishes to access is, in the cases Anubhav is describing, simply those books about which one is curious. Nothing life and death there. I can see why one has a right to, say, some of the information Wikileaks might distribute, but I don't see why one has a right (or whatever) to any information one wants. Certainly not the intellectual products of other people.
Second, one already has access to that information. It just costs money. The point isn't that one is gaining access to information one otherwise couldn't get, but rather that one is saving money in doing so.
I know people over the internet who fileshare philosophy books because they live in poverty, or in countries without academic institutions or libraries, or because they live in countries with oppressive governments. Filesharing in these cases doesn't strike me as particularly immoral, or rather, its immorality seems to be outweighed.
But in the case of someone who fileshares a book when they could (even with some hardship) pay for it and has (politically) free access to it, this is immoral.
OK.
So, if someone countered your defense of sodomy in Texas pre-2003 by arguing that, first, there is nothing life or death about the desire to have particular kinds of sex and they don't see why one has a right (or whatever) to any kind of sex one wants, and, second, that one already has access to sodomy, one merely has to move to a state where it's legal, and that therefore committing sodomy in Texas pre-2003 was in fact net immoral, what would be your response?
BTW, at about this point I feel somewhat obligated to state my own position on these sorts of issues, which is roughly speaking that violating the law is not in and of itself immoral, but neither is enforcing it. Which is to say, when I violate the law, I move myself into a position where it is potentially moral to imprison me, confiscate my property, reduce my future potential for valuable years, or even kill me. (There are other considerations that affect whether that potential is actualized.)
That said, I'm not trying to argue in favor of that position here, and you can feel free to ignore it if you wish. I just feel socially obligated to get my own cards out on the table.
I should perhaps also say that I was routinely violating U.S. anti-sodomy laws prior to 2003 and would continue to be doing so if those laws were still in place in my state of residence. Not that those things are actually relevant at all, but they seemed worth saying anyway.
I would say first that the freedom to have a sex life of one's choosing is a life and death matter (not literally of course). I mean that this freedom is of great moral significance, and its curtailment is justifiable only under extreme circumstances (what these could be, I cannot imagine). I'd be happy to defend that if pressed, though I doubt you disagree. I'm sure we would agree that this is not merely a case of breaking the law so as to take pleasure in something, and that a case like this (like consuming drugs illegally) is quite different from the case of sodomy.
Second, having to move to a different state doesn't constitute free access. If we understood free access that way, we would lose track of what it meant to say that a government is oppressive with respect to such access.
I think breaking the law is immoral as a rule. This can be offset if the law itself is unjust or impractical, or if extreme circumstances produce an exception. I think breaking the law is immoral because the polity and its stability and coherence isn't just a practical good but a moral one. Or rather, I think the polity is one of the major conditions that make moral goods possible. It seems uncontroversial to me to say that we have special moral relationships with our country as a whole and with our fellow citizens, relationships which we don't share with just anyone. As a US citizen, I bear some responsibility for the actions of my government. I rightly feel shame at our policies about torture. But I bear no responsibility for the actions of the Chinese government. I rightly feel angry that they torture people, but would not rightly feel ashamed.
ETA: on the morality of breaking/enforcing the law: I take it we would agree that these stand and fall together. If breaking is wrong, enforcing is at least morally significant, and if enforcing is morally significant, so is breaking the law. Executing someone for jaywalking or filesharing, even if it's consistant with the law, is deeply evil and unjust. If you accept this and the above premise, this implies that breaking the law is likewise morally significant.
OK. Thanks for clarifying; this was helpful.
For my own part:
* I agree that the stability and coherence of the polity is a practical good, and that it is a moral good. (I suspect that I don't agree with the line you're drawing between those goods, but it's irrelevant in this case.)
* I agree that the aggregate cost of individuals complying with particular laws (or of being punished for their violation) can in certain cases exceed the collective benefit of enforcing that law. In those cases, I would not consider it a moral good to either enforce or comply with such a law.
* I probably don't agree with your reasons for asserting the "special moral relationships" between, for example, me and my country, but I agree with you that in practice I probably have more ability to influence U.S. policy than that of other countries of similar power, and that ability weighs into my moral relationship to U.S. policy.
* I don't endorse feeling ashamed about things I cannot influence.
* I agree that if enforcing a law in a particular context is morally significant, breaking that law in that context is also morally significant. (It's not clear to me that equation holds across contexts.) Ditto for (breaking a law is wrong) -> (enforcing that law is morally significant) * I agree that executing someone for jaywalking or filesharing is wrong. (Also "deeply evil and unjust," if you like, though I'm not sure what those terms add beyond emphasis.)
* I agree that jaywalking or filesharing in a context where those actions can lead to my execution is morally significant, and that I can infer that conclusion from the above claims (as well as from general principles).
That's nutty. It's like saying the dictionary authors are the ultimate authority on language. You've got the causality the wrong way round.
The only convincing argument for following the law for me is that the rule of law is important and we can only maintain it if people respect the law. But that is instrumental in creating the kind of society we want. You get close to suggesting this but undermine yourself by then claiming that the rule of law "isn't just a practical good but a moral one."
If following the law were moral, you should be proposing more laws like "everyone has to breathe" so that we can all be more moral. Or do you believe that we need to punish some people in order to be moral?
That's... very odd. You should remove US citizenship from your self-identity so that you can think more clearly about this. The US is torturing people, China is torturing people, both are very bad. You perhaps have more ability to affect US torture and should therefore pay more attention, but they are not a different kind of responsibility.
If you don't like torture, do what you can against it. Don't just excuse yourself because you don't count the entities involved as part of your personal identity.
Good point.
Haha. So cautious. I know that feel.
I don't know the consequences. It just seemed reasonable, and clarifying things like that usually clears things up a bit.